Amid the revelations in the latest avalanche of Epstein files lurked a particularly sleazy one about Donald Trump’s Commerce Secretary, Howard Lutnick.

It turns out that Lutnick, who has sworn that he cut off his relationship with the pedophile in 2005, arranged to have lunch with him on his private island in 2012—four years after Epstein was convicted of procuring a child for sex.

Since the files emerged, Lutnick has been strangely silent—I say “strangely” because customarily he is incapable of shutting his piehole. I’m waiting to hear what he planned to discuss with Epstein over lunch—perhaps their shared interest in commerce?

Asked by the New York Times about his inclusion in the Epstein files, Lutnick said, “I spent zero time with him” before hanging up.
To be honest, I’d never heard of Lutnick until he joined Trump’s clown car. Learning about him has been like contracting an STD you didn’t know existed.

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It’s become a cliché to call Elon Musk a Bond villain, but it’s an apter description of Lutnick, who, in Blofeldian fashion, has used his TV appearances to divulge an evil scheme or—even more inexplicably—to commit an actual crime in plain sight.

Though his on-air atrocities have been jaw-dropping to the uninitiated, they must come as no surprise to people familiar with him from his long tenure as CEO of the financial services behemoth Cantor Fitzgerald, where, according to Forbes, he became known as “the most hated man on Wall Street.”